Former Soviet citizens in Wehrmacht or other Third Reich organizations or captivity.

Thursday, April 30, 2015

TRAWNIKI MEN

Inspection of Trawnikimänner by Karl Streibel at Trawniki. They were tasked with the liquidation of Jewish ghettos in occupied Poland.

Trawniki was a unique dual-purpose camp whose role in the
Holocaust was of great significance yet its name is little known beyond
academic specialists and war crimes lawyers. It was originally established in
July 1941 in the grounds of an abandoned sugar factory as a detention facility
for special categories of Soviet POW: those considered either especially
dangerous or potential collaborators. It then became a training facility for SS
auxiliaries from the territories of the USSR (primarily Ukrainians) in
September. They were initially drawn from the captured Soviet conscripts but
later included a substantial number of volunteers. The `Trawnikis', known to
the Germans as Hiwis (from Hilfswillige, volunteers), became notorious for
their role as guards in the Aktion Reinhard camps. They were also deployed in
camps such as Poniatowa and Janowska and used in ghetto clearance operations in
major cities. Trawniki was thus crucial in supplying the SS with the manpower
it required to implement the Holocaust.

Odilo Globocnik, SS and Police Leader in Lublin, Poland. Unable
to satisfy his manpower needs out of local resources, Globocnik prevailed upon
Himmler to recruit non-Polish auxiliaries from the Soviet border regions. The
key person on Globocnik's Operation Reinhard staff for this task was Karl
Streibel. He and his men visited the POW camps and recruited Ukrainian,
Latvian, and Lithuanian "volunteers" (Hilfswillige, or Hiwis) who
were screened on the basis of their anti-Communist (and hence almost invariably
anti-Semitic) sentiments, offered an escape from probable starvation, and
promised that they would not be used in combat against the Soviet army. These
"volunteers" were taken to the SS camp at Trawniki for training.
Under German SS officers and ethnic German noncommissioned officers, they were
formed into units on the basis of nationality.

Over the next two and a half years, 2,000 to 3,000
easterners (mainly Ukrainians) were trained at Trawniki. They formed the bulk
of the men running the death camps. On average, only 20 to 35 German SS men
were stationed at each camp. Each camp was normally commanded by an SS captain,
with perhaps one lieutenant present as a deputy commandant. All of the other SS
men were sergeants; there were no SS privates in the camps.

During the Holocaust the Germans were also fighting major
military campaigns on which their survival depended. Their manpower was
stretched very thin, but they were at first reluctant to recruit large numbers
of fighting forces among the "inferior races" of Eastern Europe. They
were, however, entirely prepared to make use of volunteers to assist in
genocide. In the Baltic States (Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia) and the
Ukraine, right-wing nationalist groups welcomed the Germans as liberators from
"Jewish Bolshevism" and launched pogroms against the Jews either
independently or under the benevolent gaze of the Wehrmacht. Organized
variously as patriotic militias or "self-protection" units, they
killed thousands of Jews and so impressed the Germans that the latter formed
them into Schutzmannschaften (police) battalions under the command of German
officers. These collaborators were encouraged to recruit volunteers from among
their countrymen in German prisoner of war camps. The Germans called those who
stepped forward Hilfswillige (volunteer helpers), Hiwis for short; eventually
they came to number in the hundreds of thousands. After receiving training at
SS camps such as Trawniki in eastern Poland, most of them assisted German order
police in various actions against Jews, Gypsies, and partisans. The Germans
found that they could usually rely on the Hiwis to perform the least pleasant
tasks, such as flushing Jews out of ghetto hiding places and shooting on the
spot those too frail to walk to deportation vehicles. Other volunteers became
guards at camps and ghettos all over Eastern Europe. More than three quarters
of the guards at Treblinka, Bekzec, and Sobibor were Hiwis. Eventually, in 1943
and 1944, Hitler authorized combat units made up of Eastern European
volunteers, including two Waffen SS divisions made up of Latvians and one each
of Ukrainians and Estonians.

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About Me

Mitch Williamson is a technical writer with an
interest in military and naval affairs. He has published articles in
Cross & Cockade International and Wartime magazines. He was
research associate for the Bio-history Cross in the Sky, a book about
Charles 'Moth' Eaton's career, in collaboration with the flier's son,
Dr Charles S. Eaton. He also assisted in picture research for John
Burton's Fortnight of Infamy.
Mitch is now publishing on the WWW various specialist websites combined
with custom website design work.